MartinezPIVS

Our world is in great need. We are in a delicate situation, a desperate situation. We have to find an urgent solution to the miseries of our moral life before it is too late!

We notice that neither in contemporary relations, nor in world affairs, do we human beings really appreciate individual human life as the highest value on earth. On the contrary, insensitivity to human life has been a disastrous characteristic of our human condition at every stage of history. We haven’t achieved moral improvement in this area: moral insensitivity has always been our most horrendous disease.

At this very moment millions of people around the world are willing to kill their fellow men and sacrifice their own life in the name of abstract concepts, that is, in the name of the lowest values – abstractions — which they mistakenly think are the highest. The perturbed mind of these people make them identify themselves with some authority, or with their country, or with an idea, a belief, an ideology which obligates them to sacrifice everything, including their own life – even the whole world – in order to achieve their goals. People thinking in this way, taking abstract concepts to the extreme, are a nightmare, a terror for the rest of the world.

Both terrorism and war are tremendous proofs of our moral disease, and have become a common and permanent fact of our daily life…..even though they are axiologically immoral. It’s a catastrophic error. We’re all experiencing the disastrous consequences of this wrong and chaotic value-confusion based upon prejudice or irrational concepts. Do we need to be smashed against a wall before we get a sudden realization of the true values we are about to lose, such as human existence itself?

We need a sudden existentialist insight, a flash of moral awareness to overcome the lack of meaning in our lives. We need to be more aware of how precarious our situation is, how miserable living conditions are for the majority of the earth’s people. If we understand ourselves and are able to value our own precious life, then we can participate in a moral transformation of our world. The world moral situation is what we are. If we are totally unaware of ourselves, that is what we create around us, that is the society in which we live.

Robert S. Hartman, the founder of value science, concluded that we are unable to perceive of our current condition as a “moral crisis,” and that we need a science to help us comprehend the seriousness of our situation. He wrote that to be able to grasp how serious it is, and to survive, we have

to create a new world of morality, but this new moral world would depend upon the creation of a moral science, a science of values, which he named Formal Axiology. Only a value

science would lead us to moral action, in the same way the natural sciences led to technological action through their mathematical/empirical patterns.

Hartman wondered: “Why hasn’t moral philosophy transformed our moral reality, the world of human relations, in the same way that natural philosophy (which later evolved into physical science) has radically changed our external world?”

The quest of Hartman’s life was to introduce orderly thinking into the chaos of the value fields (the so-called disciplines which study human relations and behavior.) This will actually be an inner transformation that would begin changing our mental concepts and confusions regarding values.

To overcome this deficiency, Hartman created a system of superior logical unity independent of the experience of value but able to explain it. The theoretic concepts of science must be connected with the data of experience. The theoretic structure must be anchored in the phenomenal reality. The science with a minimum of axiomatic assumptions gives a multitude of conclusions, in a pattern so varied and detailed that its features mirror the multitude of those found in the realm of values. To find out more about this new science, see this site and peruse the research studies, and check out the linked sites where formal axiology is explained and elucidated.

RSHI Road Map Vision

EDUCATIONAL TOPICS

This website gives information about the following topics and many others:
General Topics
Robert S. Hartman
Perspectives on values in
Values in business
Axiology
Value Theory
Values
Intrinsic
Extrinsic
Systemic
Personality Profiles
Hartman Value Profile
Hartman Value … [Read More]

BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS

Note from our Board: It has come to our attention that some users of this page assume that all books listed below have been carefully reviewed and endorsed by the Board of Directors of the Robert S. Hartman Institute, but this is not so. Our Board takes no stand on the following … [Read More]